[OSM-legal-talk] Attribution

[Peter Miller]

Personally I believe that the 'Licensor' of planet.osm is OSMF (who create a
Derived Work from the individual contributions each week). We would need to
check this with a lawyer.

 

Personally I really don't see any problem with jumping from a short textual
string on paper (ie "licenced from www.openstreetmap.org
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/>  (CC BY SA)") to a full list of contributors
on the openstreetmap web site. In this day and age that seems totally
'reasonable to the medium or means', especially as I think we should expect
to have a list of 100K + contributors in due course and this method makes it
possibly to remove people from this list should they request it. Again this
is something to check with a real lawyer.

 

Any thoughts about what should go in the 'flannel panel' and is that really
necessary in all cases?

 

Btw, OSMF has an generous offer from a commercial company to cover the cost
of legal advice relating to this question, so when we have agreed what we
want to achieve we can get on a get it checked out. I will let them
introduce themselves onto the list in due course.

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

Peter

 

 

 

 

"

Richard Fairhurst


Tue Jul 10 14:35:37 BST 2007
 
Peter Miller wrote:
 
> Btw, who would you say was the Licensor for planet.osm was in the text you
> quote?  "to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource
> Identifier, if any, that *Licensor* specifies to be associated with the
> Work"
 
Erk. I'd guess (IANAL &c.) that the licensors are the individual OSM  
contributors (through the derived work provisions) and OSMF (as the  
creator of planet.osm).
 
Fortunately, both the contributors and OSMF specify  
www.openstreetmap.org as the URI to be associated with it!
 
> Also, do you think that listing the Original Authors on the OSM web site
> would be an appropriate interpretation of "give the Original Author credit
> reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name
> (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied"
 
The attribution-of-original-authors part of CC-BY-* is the bit I feel  
least confident about. I'd agree with your suggestion _if_ the licence  
doesn't insist that every contributor has to be credited. But it's a  
bit of a stretch to reinterpret "conveying the name" as "conveying the  
URL of a webpage where the name is listed" - especially for paper maps.
 
Look at wikitravel.org for an example of the problem. They're CC-BY-SA  
licensed, and to comply with the attribution requirement, every page  
footer has a list of contributors to that particular page. (In the  
very longest lists, this is abbreviated slightly, by means of an  
'...and [[others]]' link.) We don't do that.
 
cheers
Richard

"

 

 

---

Peter Miller   Ito!    peter.miller at itoworld.com     www.itoworld.com

 

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